THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Ravage Part A” (March 28-April 3)

Written By Michael Workman

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Ravage Part A

Description
We're all just admins of thought! Amid a small-town war, a mediocre call center contractor gets a suitcase for her fatuous small talk.

While you wait to hear if they'll pay your claim, there is almost nothing like the silent buzz at the other end of the line. Or when you say something that requires a response and the world says back, "no worries". There's an art to miscommunication, unthinking, the void, and the customer service call. Phoning it in might just be a necessary part of life.

This rough-edged sketch mixing performance art living and film is a study of the phone call, American doofiness, and blank minds under the reign of the corporate call script. Everyone is impotent in the institutional setting.

Runtime: 20 minutes, 38 seconds
Best Viewed: Any Screen, Cinema Presentation

Director Biography - Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng
Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng does experimental joke art, made the pop-up restaurant as performance art in 2007 and developed a new model of political strategy behind some of the largest online protests in history, and has some poems published. She’s Ngai/MA, born in Macau as a boat person.

Director Statement
I hoped that when I became an adult, the illogic of the things around me would make sense and adults did in fact know what they were doing. That didn’t really happen. This is a rough-edged sketch about that particular American doofiness and unthinking behind the inelegance of human interaction on customer service calls and our new inability to engage with the world. Ravage is about confronting the non-answer through the art of the phone call. A special kind of misery of the half-assed. You know when you hear it or have been brought to your knees: a certain unique inability to recognize bullshit and parallel existence even in close proximity; when something important gets said but the world just says back, “no worries”; or 2+2 means let me transfer you. But, despite that mediocrity in thinking in the real world as we know it, I realize that the world holds itself up—most things can only be half assed AND the butting of humans gets so beyond the given and weird and sublime all the time.  I wanted these half-atmosphere performance art sketches to track exactly that.   Gouche and Mo are great at living! And, the impotence of their petty workplace misconduct fighting against institutional illogic is grandeur in the greatest sense.

I only realized after the making of Ravage that at 13, I illegally attained a job as a telemarketer where I cold-called people about replacing all the windows in their house. 0 sales. Unexpected plays out of our half-lived experiences bridge the distance.

This is performance art that hopefully doesn’t get in trouble.  So much art tries to trick people into pretending they care more than they need to. That’s bad trouble. A physical therapist suggested he would put Ravage on the televisions in the office to watch while he's working. That's why Ravage should be installed in waiting rooms and doesn't fully fit in the movie theatre or in a gallery, being somewhere uncomfortable between film and performance. the call center is performing as itself in alternate reality or alternate lifestyle is getting recontextualized. Hopefully, that's more than ok!

Credits & Specifications:
Tiffy Yingy Cheng (Writer, Director)
Jonathan Klys (Writer)
Shea Mowat (Writer)
Maisie Sibbison-Alves (Key Cast, "Gouche")
Tiffy Yingy Cheng (Key Cast, "Mo")
Donny Warner Shaw III (Key Cast, "Curmo 1")
Dan Greenwood (Key Cast, "Curmo 2 - French")
Crystal Regan (Key Cast, "Town Assistant")
Barry Febos (Key Cast, "Window Curtain Rapper")
Tiffy Ying (Key Cast, "Therapist")
Kai Xiong Chong (Key Cast, "Kitchen Worker")
Wendy Sibbison (Key Cast, "Hipster")
Chris Cooper (Sound)
Shea Mowat (Sound)
Eli Winograd (Sound)
Donny Warner Shaw III (Music)
Chris Cooper (Music)
Jess Goddard (Music)
Early Shinada (Colorist)
Daria Kravtsova (Visual Effects)

Completion Date: June 10, 2024
Production Budget: 12,000 USD
Country of Origin: Portugal, United States, United States
Country of Filming: United States, Slovenia, United Kingdom, United States
Language: English
Shooting Format: Digital
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Film Color: Color
First-time Filmmaker: Yes

Michael Workman

Michael Workman is a choreographer, language, visual and movement artist, dance and performance artist, writer, reporter, and sociocultural critic. In addition to his work at the Chicago Tribune, Guardian US, Newcity magazine, WBEZ Chicago Public Radio and elsewhere, Workman is also Director of Bridge, an artistic collective and 501 (c) (3) publishing and programming organization (bridge-chicago.org). His choreographic writing has been included in Propositional Attitudes, an "anthology of recent performance scores, directions and instructions" published by Golden Spike Press, and his Perfect Worlds: Artistic Forms & Social Imaginaries Vol. 1, the first in a 3-volume series, was released by StepSister Press in October 2018 with a day-long program of performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Most recently, two of his scores were accepted for publication in a special edition of the Notre Dame Review focusing on the work of participants in the &NOW Festival of Innovative Writing.

https://michaelworkmanstudio.com
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Le Cosmos” (March 21-27)